Reality and Its Appearance

140 Pages·2010·0.44 MB·English

by  Nicholas Rescher

Reality and Its Appearance
Continuum Studies in American Philosophy
Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA
Continuum Studies in American Philosophy is a major monograph series from
Continuum. The series features fi rst-class scholarly research monographs across
the fi eld of American philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the
fi eld of philosophical research.
After Rorty, G. Elijah Dann
America’s First Women Philosophers, Dorothy G. Rogers
John Searle and the Construction of Social Reality, Joshua Rust
The Legacy of John Rawls, edited by Thom Brooks and Fabian Freyenhagen
Nozick, Autonomy and Compensation, Dale Murray
Peirce’s Philosophy of Communication, Mats Bergman
Peirce’s Pragmatic Theory of Inquiry, Elizabeth Cooke
Pragmatist Metaphysics, Sami Pihlström
Quine on Meaning, Eve Gaudet
Quine’s Naturalism, Paul A. Gregory
Relativism in Contemporary American Philosophy, Timothy Mosteller
Richard Rorty’s New Pragmatism, Edward J. Grippe
Thomas Kuhn’s Revolution, James A. Marcum
Varieties of Pragmatism, Douglas McDermid
Virtue Ethics: Dewey and MacIntyre, Stephen Carden
Reality and Its
Appearance
Nicholas Rescher
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Nicholas Rescher 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
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without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-5629-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rescher, Nicholas.
Reality and its appearance/Nicholas Rescher.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-5629-7
1. Reality. 2. Realism. I. Title.
BD331.R427 2010
111--dc22 2009017521
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Reality vs. Appearance 4
1. Reality vs. Appearance 4
2. Real Existence Involves Mind-Transcendence 8
3. The Historical Perspective 11
4. True Thought is Coordinate with Reality 12
5. An Ontological Fallacy 14
6. The Impetus of Mind 17
Chapter 2: How True Thought “Agrees” with Reality 20
1. Fact Outruns Language 20
2. The Perspective of Musical Chairs 24
3. The Vastness of Fact 26
4. Truth and Reality 29
5. Reality Involucrates Exactness 32
6. Reality Involucrates Completeness 34
7. The Lesson 40
Chapter 3: Cognitive Access to Reality 43
1. Adaequatio Ad Rem: On the Conformity of
Thought and Reality 43
2. On Our Knowledge of Reality 44
3. Reality and Our Knowledge of It 46
4. Cognitive Depth: The Complexity of
the Real 50
5. The Impetus of Presumption 53
vi Contents
6. Controls of Cognitive Adequacy:
The Rationale of Retrojustifi cation 57
7. A Virtuous Circularity 59
Chapter 4: Problems of Fallibilism 64
1. Specifi c vs. Indefi nite Knowledge
and Ignorance 64
2. Lessons of the Preface Paradox 69
3. Oversimplifi cation as a Gateway to Error 71
4. Why Oversimplifi cation? Scientifi c
Progress and Cognitive Complexity 74
5. Cognitive Myopia: Confusion and
Confl ation and Their Consequences 78
Chapter 5: Scientifi c Realism 82
1. A Different Sort of “Reality” 82
2. The Trouble with Scientifi c Realism 86
3. A Utopian Demand 91
Chapter 6: The Rationale of Realism 93
1. Realism and Cognition 94
2. The Role of Realism in Informative
Communication 97
3. Agreement is Not Essential 102
4. Our Presuppositional Commitment
to Reality 103
5. The Rationale of Realism 105
6. A Pragmatic Foundation 110
7. Retrojustifi cation: The Wisdom of
Hindsight 112
8. Avoiding Circularity 115
9. A Review 117
10. The Aspect of Idealism 119
Notes 123
References 128
Name Index 131
Preface
Reality and appearance are the ying and yang of existence. Each
is needed to complement the other within a meaningful whole.
Reality without appearance is cognitively sterile; appearance
without reality is mere illusion.
To be sure, the gap between reality and appearance has
intrigued philosophers since the very start of their subject. And
in recent years it has been part of the stagesetting of my concerns
with the limits and limitations of human cognition, extending
over many publications. The present book is an attempt to put
various pieces of the mosaic together into a coherent picture of
the relation between reality and its appearance.
I am indebted and grateful to Estelle Burris for her ever-
competent help in preparing my materials in a form suitable
for printing.
Nicholas Rescher
Pittsburgh PA
February, 2008
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Introduction
“Do not judge by appearances” says the old adage. But while this
is sound advice, we cannot follow it blindly. For appearances are
frequently all that we have to judge by—and they are often a
good deal better guides than nothing at all. And yet there are
many problems here. The distinction between reality and its
appearance is indispensable for any account of knowledge and
its many congeners—ignorance, error, and misunderstanding
included.
Examination of the relation between reality and appearance
did not have to await the 1893 publication of F. H. Bradley’s
classic Appearance and Reality; it has been on the agenda of
philosophy from its very inception in classical antiquity. And
over the years there has developed a vast literature on the
topic—a literature so vast, in fact, that it seems futile to entertain
the idea of making any instructive additions to it. Nevertheless,
I have been emboldened to make the attempt by a wish to
unravel certain confusions or confl ictions of ideas that have
crept upon the scene over the years.
At the heart of the book here lies a series of questions:
(cid:122) How is the conception of reality to be conceived of?
(cid:122) What—if anything—can be said substantially about what
reality is like “in itself”?
(cid:122) How are we to conceive of the relation between reality and
what we accept as being our knowledge of it?
One key task of this book is to substantiate and elucidate
the idea that two distinguishable and distinct conceptions of